Hospitals Hope Extra Face Time and Personal Attention Will Help Make Recovery Easier

Hospitals are freeing up nurses to do the one thing they often don't have enough time for: taking care of patients.

Swamped with tasks such as hunting for supplies, tracking down medications, filling out paperwork at the nursing station and looking for missing test results, nurses may spend less than two hours of a 12-hour shift in direct patient care, studies show. But research has also found that the more time nurses spend at the...